(LiveHacking.Com) – The hacker group Anonymous has attacked three UK government websites, including the Prime Minister’s site, in a protest about the extradition of British citizens to the USA and about a proposed new law to increase the surveillance powers of the British state. The so-called hacktivists disrupted traffic through a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, designed to take the websites offline by flooding them with more traffic than they can handle. The sites attacked were homeoffice.gov.uk (Home Office), number10.gov.uk (Prime Minister’s Office) and justice.gov.uk (Ministry of Justice). By Sunday morning all the sites appeared to be functioning normally again.

It appears that the attacks were in response to a proposed new law would allow the British government to conduct some trials in secret and allow authorities to track the phone calls, emails, text messages and online activity of everyone in the country.

The group took credit for the attack in a series of tweets (here, here and here) which specifically mention the UK’s proposed “draconian surveillance proposals” and “derogation of civil rights.”

The attack could be considered as quite courageous, especially in light of recent efforts by global law enforcement agencies to crackdown on the group’s cyber protests. Sophos noted on its blog that “other hacktivists who have launched DDoS attacks against websites belonging to British authorities have been arrested in recent history, and are currently facing trial.”

In a separate attack, the group targeted the website of the US House of Representatives but failed to prevent access.